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Adorno attended high school in his hometown of Frankfurt. During this time he met the future social scientist and film critic Siegfried Kracauer. Between 1921 and 1923, Adorno studied philosophy, sociology, psychology and music theory at Frankfurt University. During this time he made the acquaintance of the sociologist and philosopher Max Horkheimer and the writer Walter Benjamin. While he was still a student, Adorno wrote music reviews for the magazine "Neue Blatter für Kunst und Literatur". In 1924 he completed his studies with the doctoral thesis "The Transcendence of the Thing and Noematic in Husserl's Phenomenology" with Hans Cornelius. With this work, Adorno showed himself to be entirely in the tradition of transcendental epistemology.
Adorno then studied music theory and composition with Alban Berg and Arnold Schönberg in the two years 1925/26. Meanwhile he worked as a writer and composer. From 1929 to 1930 he was an editorial staff member at the cultural magazine "Anbruch". The following year, Adorno received his doctorate with the work "Kierkegaard, Construction of the Aesthetic"; his inaugural lecture dealt with the "current nature of philosophy". In 1933, when the National Socialists seized power, he was banned from teaching. A year later, Adorno retired to Oxford. There he became a lecturer at Merton College. Three years later he married Gretel Karplus. In 1938, Adorno moved to New York and officially joined the Institute for Social Research. From 1942 to 1944 he lived in California. There he wrote, together with Max Horkheimer, the famous work "Dialectics of Enlightenment", which was published in 1947 and was not without controversy.
The work, which deals with the European catastrophe of fascism and National Socialism, was only published in Germany in 1969. In it, Adorno and Horkheimer address the question of "why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, enters a new kind of Barbarism sinks". Until 1949, Adorno was head of the Research Project on Social Discrimination in Los Angeles. Then he moved back to Germany as a result of the end of the war. There he initially worked as an associate professor of social philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. At the same time, he headed the Institute for Social Research together with Horkheimer. This year he published the title "Philosophy of New Music". A year later, the work he co-authored, "The Authoritarian Character," was published. This empirical study examines the connection between belief in authority and fascism from a sociological perspective. In 1951 the text "Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life" was published. Adorno took part in the Cologne Wednesday Talks in 1952 on the topic of "Cultural and social structural change in a united Germany".
He then headed the Hacker Foundation in Beverly Hills for a year. From 1956 to 1969 Adorno taught as a full professor of sociology and philosophy at Frankfurt University. In 1958 he was also appointed head of the Institute for Social Research in the same city. The following year he was awarded the Berlin Critics' Prize for Literature. At the Sociologists' Day in Tübingen in 1961, the positivism dispute that went down in the history of the social sciences was opened between Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno. Eight years later, Adorno published the work "The Positivism Controversy in German Sociology" on this subject. In 1963 the city of Frankfurt honored him with the Goethe plaque. In his work "Negative Dialectic," published in 1966, Adorno expressed a new definition of the relationship between subject and object. He assigns philosophy the task of presenting social problems using philosophical means.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer have made a name for themselves as the main representatives of the Frankfurt School and critical theory. Adorno criticizes the bourgeois ideology of post-war society as well as modern bureaucracy and technology. In doing so, he made himself heard, particularly among the 1968 generation. However, Adorno strictly rejected violence in processes of social upheaval.
Theodor W. Adorno died on August 6, 1969 in Brig, Switzerland, as a result of a heart attack.
